July 9, 2012

Word Lens finally launches on Android

These days smartphones can do just about anything. However, the Play Store has been really lacking a good real-time translation app that can work anywhere and anytime. Sure enough there is Google Goggles that basically takes a picture and then sent off to Google's servers where they would use OCR to see what is in the image. However this would only work if your phone had an active internet connection.

With Word Lens, everything is done in real-time and is offline capable. It can translate text seen through your phone's camera in real-time and translate almost immediate, instead of taking 20-30 seconds to be processed through Google's servers.

The big advantage here is that you won't need an active internet connection, which means that you can take it anywhere and still be able to use it. After its release on the iPhone, it has taken 2 years for Word Lens to be able to finally make it to the Android platform. Right now it only supports 3 languages by default (English, French, Spanish), so if you want additional languages, you will have to buy them. The language packs are currently on sale for $4.99 until 22 July.

It is still being developed and testing on the Android platform and some users have reported installation issues and non-working features. The app probably has a few more revisions coming its way before it is perfect.